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Just Kidding: This Game May Break the Kickstarter Record

It's still a safe bet that the record for most-funded videogame on Kickstarter is going to be broken. But the game that does it may not be the one we thought.

The most-funded game at the moment is Torment: Tides of Numenera by inXile Entertainment. This was no fluke. The campaign had everything going for it: the successor to a beloved game (Planescape: Torment) without a sequel and a fan base desperate for more. It also was inXile's second campaign, so it could learn from its past experiences.

It helped that the campaign ran in early 2013, when everyone was high on the benefits of Kickstarter but hadn't yet had to grapple with the fact these projects would take a long time to develop, and wouldn't always deliver on their promises. Torment is the only videogame to break $4 million on Kickstarter.

For awhile, it looked like Yooka-Laylee had a chance to beat that number. It, too, is the unofficial follow-up to a series, Rare's Banjo-Kazooie, that fans believe is dead, created by many of the original talents behind the games they loved. It took off like a rocket, clearing $1 million in the first day, much like Torment.

But a few days later, a new challenger emerged: Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, another spiritual successor to another series fans believed dead, the specific flavor of Castlevania games produced by erstwhile impresario Koji Igarashi. It, too, got off to a quick start, reaching nearly $1 million on its first day.

Yooka-Laylee.

Playtonic Games

As of today, even before the funding rounds have closed, Bloodstained and Yooka are the sixth and seventh most-funded videogames. A few days ago, something curious happened: Bloodstained surpassed Yooka-Laylee's, even though the latter's campaign had started 10 days earlier. Many things could contribute to this, but the big one is the stark difference in how the two campaigns have been run.

Yooka-Laylee, so far, has been a fairly run-of-the-mill Kickstarter: It launched to great fanfare and a massive burst of funding, which flattened after a few days. Kickstarter campaigns like this usually start strong, plateau in the middle, then hit a burst at the end as fence-sitters decide to get in.

Yooka-Laylee's developer added a fairly pedestrian list of "stretch goals" after reaching the initial goal—more levels, more play modes, additional platforms that the game would appear on, et cetera. But it quickly hit all of those as well, then stopped adding features. Currently, it's just got one far-away stretch goal, and it's only a vague promise of "some additional content."

This is not an argument that Yooka-Laylee should begin promising more stretch goals to get more money, not unless it wants to be another Godus. Perhaps, in retrospect, it should have set a higher initial goal, then spread the stretch goals out across larger monetary increments. It blew past them all so quickly that they didn't have the time to make each one count in terms of increasing the game's exposure, rallying fans to raise their backing amounts and get their friends to pledge, etc. By and large, it seems like Yooka's stretch goals were wasted.

When you look at the Bloodstained campaign, you can see that the stretch goals are spread wider, with larger increments between them. But much more than that, the campaign itself has been set up like an elaborate metagame of its own. They've set up a whole list of "backer achievements," which are earned by the backer community at large by doing things that are beneficial to the campaign's visibility—creating fan art of the characters, liking the social media pages, getting views on the YouTube trailer. As they unlock achievements, they gain virtual items in their inventory, which alter the campaign—they might unlock more stretch goals, add items to the reward tiers, even add features to the final game.

Koji Igarashi

The results have been a constant stream of interest in Bloodstained, with new bursts of activity every time something is revealed. Most recently, the developer said that Ayami Kojima, the illustrator of the Castlevania games, would create cover artwork for the game—but only for the special edition available via the $100 reward tier. This is a huge incentive for big fans to raise the dollar amounts of their existing pledges.

You can quantify the difference here. Yooka-Laylee has over 20,000 more backers than Bloodstained, but they've pledged less money collectively. Bloodstained's average pledge per backer, according to Kicktraq, is currently $80. That's significantly higher than every other Kickstarter in its range: Yooka-Laylee's is about $47. Torment's was $56. Project Eternity, the second most-funded game, was $54.

And while Bloodstained's daily pledges have plateaued, just as expected, the plateau is higher. Thus far, in its lowest full day of funding, it took in over $36,000. That's more than double what Torment took in at the same point in its funding cycle. Yooka-Laylee is hovering around $10,000 per day.

Bloodstained is getting measurably better results than a standard Kickstarter, which means that in short order, campaigns like this might be the standard. Bloodstained's developer contracted an outside company, Fangamer, to run the campaign, and that too may become an important part of a major Kickstarter like this. It's entirely possible that both these games could finish out their funding rounds having broken the record, but if only one of them does, we'll know why.